Author Archives: oinsketta

How Do you form a team?

I’ve been puzzling over how to take an idea, made real now in a NYC public school over the course of 36 weeks, and turn it into an idea worth discussing, an idea people would be happy to kick in some money to see flourish in the world.

The short version of the idea:  give primary school children the chance to play and work together, teach each other skills they’ve mastered, show the results of this in animations they produce and score.  The adults in the room keep track of time, support and admire the ideas and products, lend a hand with some technical detail the children may ask for help with.  Once in a while the adults also corral a kid who is going out of control, calm the hopped up little bugger down.  But for the most part, it’s a buzzing beehive run by the kids themselves.

I picture it functioning best in the worst schools in the city.  I’ve already seen great positive changes in several of the 14 kids who participated in the first sustained workshop.   A class clown who was disorganized, sloppy, had a dozen unfocused ideas a week evolved into a focused, ingenious animator.  She was very proud of herself, and I was too.   When I asked her the most important thing she’d learned in the workshop she said “work together.”  I gave a little yip of approval which she humorously imitated, making it even more ridiculous.   A boy who was quite egotistical and a bit of a bully became one of the most helpful and interactive kids in the group.   I imagine the transformations in “at risk” kids will be even more dramatic.

Children in most schools, particularly  in poor neighborhoods, are rarely given any autonomy outside of choosing a red or purple crayon to color in the crude outlines of some shoddily photocopied drawing, a turkey at Thanksgiving, a crudely drawn Martin Luther King Jr.’s suit during Black History Month.  The photocopy machines in slum schools always produce worn out, grey sheets, since teachers pump out work sheets by the thousands every day until the machines give out completely.  Toner is expensive and so rarely replaced until the images are almost invisible on the pages.   Creativity in those schools is considered a luxury these poor kids can’t afford.

If I would shame the well-to-do enough to fund this program I need to expand it to a number of schools.   I need a team.  How do you form a team?  Asking for volunteers has not been a sustainable strategy, when people do you a favor you must be grateful, no matter how small the favor is.   It seems to me that my assistants, the people I would groom to replace me in a room once the program is up and running, should be paid generously, at least twice minimum wage.  So I do.  But so far, I can’t help but notice a mercenary aspect to their participation.  The hours they’re paid for they work fine.  And that work, I point out, is mainly interacting with kids who are doing interesting, funny artistic projects.  Nice work if you can get it.   Unpaid hours?  I thought you said you were paying us.

If the organization had $25,000 in the bank right now, it would be less of a problem.  I will have to raise a sum like that, 1/3 cajoled out of well-to-do people I know, the rest raised from a public whose passion must be aroused by the excellent little documentary I have to make to promote the program.  I need contributions from people I know so that strangers will see the needle on the crowd-funding meter ticking constantly up in the beginning, so they will know this program has support, is gathering momentum, is an idea worth making a tax-deductible contribution to.

But how do you form a team?  Volunteers and interns must be idealists motivated by passion for the project.   Paid people must be paid, which takes money.  How do you form a goddamned team?  And if you don’t answer this question the potential of this innovative program is another bit of unmonetized good idea friends may talk about at my memorial service, lamenting briefly that for all my talent and good ideas, I never figured out how to make a living.

Where Do Ideas Come From?

Many ideas are floating through the air at any given time.   People catch them and remark on them, causing someone else to comment, an article or book is written, a movie or TV segment made.  There are ideas whose time has come, it is simply the right moment for these things to step into the world, raise a little sand.  Ideas both beautiful and horrific enjoy their moment on the world stage, in the minds of the most curious and the most incurious.

Ideas can flutter like dust motes, cough out like particulate ash, make kids’ tongues pop out for a taste, like snowflakes.  Free floating ideas can become projectiles and plunge down causing actual damage.  There are a number of these ideas out there now, they are always there.

Other floating ideas take wing, as they say, and you can see them soaring.  Like an idea Sugata Mitra had about the education of young people and the salubrious effect of an older person showing interest, and affection, and a sense of wonder about what the young person is learning.

A sense of wonder, there’s an idea we don’t appreciate every day.

Creepy

There’s been a marked decline in laughter around here in recent months.  Funny things continue to happen all around, I’m sure, but they neep by unnoticed, don’t get to me in the same way.  It’s kind of creepy.  Virtually everyone I know seems in the grip of this grim new way of being.  

This is abstract, I realize, and calls for a colorful  illustration.   I can offer examples, but they only heighten the creepiness of this laff drought.  Why bother going down this road, if I’m not prepared to squeeze out at least one example?

OK, here’s one.  I have an old friend who is famous for being manipulative, sometimes in ways so overt they’re comical.  It is such a part of who he is that most of the time I don’t even notice the agenda he is always clutching just behind his back.  Things must always be arranged to maximize his advantage, somehow, even though how it actually benefits him is often hard to say and the price he pays for this is sometimes high.  There are many people like him, and I don’t point this out to be critical of the old fellow.

I have another old friend who is in the process of rebirthing himself.  Hard work!  I understand how hard this is and I applaud his devotion to emerging as a more mindful, compassionate, grounded person.   This chap and I have shared many a wheezy chuckle over the years over the constant inventiveness of our manipulative friend.

I got up early the other day, for me, resentful about the short sleep, in order to accommodate our host’s schedule (turns out he’d accidentally pushed everything three hours earlier without realizing it).   I move to offbeat circadian rhythms, true, and it’s rare I’m in bed before 4 a.m.   My mind gets into full power mode around 11 or 12 every night, always been that way.   So early for me is mid-morning for most other people, granted.

On short sleep I drank coffee, paid bills, answered emails, thought a little about business, showered, dressed and then it was time to go.  As my friend arrived to take us to the home of our  host I was opening a yogurt, which I bolted standing in the kitchen.  My friend smiled merrily as I complained that I had to choke down my breakfast so as not to be late to this, no doubt, artificially early play date.  Then he hurried me out to the car.

As we drove he mentioned a stream of messages he hadn’t listened to from our friend the host.   “I didn’t listen to them, I figure they were just his usual string of nervous proddings and I didn’t feel like hearing them,” he said breezily.  Then the friend called and said we wouldn’t be starting at 12:00 after all, that 2:00 was more realistic, since he was out shopping with his wife and wouldn’t be home much before 2:00.   I listened to this impassively, responded mildly and rang off.  I even let the statement that he was making things easier for me by doing it later roll off and land soundlessly on some imaginary pillow.

We headed back to Sekhnet’s where my friend made himself lunch while I went upstairs and took care of some business I hadn’t had time for, rushing to be in the car by noon.

But here’s the thing that creeps me out.  That my manipulative friend didn’t bother calling or dropping me an email the night before with the new time– to be expected.  That he said he’d moved things back to make it easier for me– well, a little problematic, in light of how much easier it actually made things, but not unexpected.  What creeps me out is that as we headed back over to our friend’s house my friend who was driving said, casually, “I heard his first message at 11:05, about not starting until 2,  but I was already in the middle of rushing through my errands to be here by noon.”

So when I was wolfing my yogurt, and complaining about being put under this kind of time crunch, he already knew there was no time crunch.   Still, he didn’t tell me to sit, relax , eat breakfast, that we had two hours, he pretended we were still running late.

“Why would you put something like this on the web, you querulous, carping prick?” asks a chorus of the two or three who will one day read this post.

Why, indeed.  I told you something creepy is in the air.

It Depends, doesn’t it?

edit 1:

Point of view determines what we see, obviously, how we interact with the world, and, to some extent, how the world interacts with us.  The glass half full, glass half empty, cost vs. benefit, things looking up, things hopeless — matters of opinion based on point of view.  In politics we have that wonderful term from economics, externalties, the hidden costs of a transaction.  What these externalities actually are is determined by where one stands to look at them.

For some of us to get the things we value, a lot of others might have to lose things they value.  Access to clean water, for example, or a safe home, or healthy traditional diets replaced with the Obesity/Diabetes Diet.  We have mass malnutrition in a land of plenty, and deforest the planet so that billions and billions of Happy Meals can be served worldwide.  (Point of view, somebody please give me the upside of any of these externalities.)

It’s human nature, after enough time passes many people stop harping on a few centuries of slavery, extermination of native peoples, destruction of the environment, externalities like that.  In order to create great wealth great sacrifices sometimes have to be made.  The people who make these sacrifices, with no say in the matter, are called losers.  We have literally billions of them living on the earth right now, they are all around us.

I apologize.  I’m cranky, carping on the nonstartling idea of atrocious injustice in the world.  Surely I’m not advocating a society where those with the least get a shot at a decent life, where those with the most are required to play fair with the rest.  That would violate the American Dream:   when I own Walmart I want to pay my workers the least the law will allow, let the government buy their health insurance.  Every cent I don’t pay my workers in wages or benefits goes directly into my pocket.

                                                                                             ii

It’s particularly airless in NYC the last few days.  There is some air, but it is thick, heated and hard to breathe.  You can breathe it, of course, but it doesn’t refresh you very much.  If you live in an airconditioned place you will only notice this thick stickiness of the air when you go outside.  The air the fans are pushing around is like warm sludge.  It hits the face like exhaust from an exhaust pipe.  I woke up after a few hours of sleep gasping like a fish on the floor of a rowboat, my head filled with dread.  The dread of everything at once.

Dread that this cyst, or fatty deposit, on the back of my left arm is a tumor.  The dread of being diagnosed with cancer at the same time I am losing the health insurance I’ve been buying for seven years.  The dread of faceless bureaucrats deciding the policy will terminate for individuals and sole proprietors on 12/31/13.  Now you can only buy this insurance if your employer is enrolled in it, God bless our independent entrepreneurs.   

Dread as I think:  if you’re 57 and have a deep family and personal history of cancer, get a job that offers health insurance and make sure you don’t lose it, loser.  They’ve tried to repeal “Obamacare” 37 times now in the land of the free/home of the brave.   Insurance premiums, meanwhile, have skyrocketed in those seven years.  They went up 20% for these last few months I’m eligible.  Tens of thousands of Americans still die preventable deaths of every year for lack of access to affordable health care.

Dread:  having created a radical and so far highly successful program for children, with virtually unlimited potential, and running out of money before it becomes self-sustaining.   As often, I am working for free, or virtually free, and those who receive the free benefit are most pleased with it.  

Dread:  having to find a business partner, somebody by nature and prejudice I think of as dry company, but someone essential for this program turning into a business that can pay my bills, create a few jobs with health insurance for myself and and my fellow workers.

Dread: of selfish, manipulative weasels of my long acquaintance, and the sickening aftertaste of remaining mild with them.

Dread:   new lump under left nipple, male breast cancer or soft tissue sarcoma.  Just what I need.

Dread:   this life-force draining heat and humidity, in this old house of Sekhnet’s, a jerry-rigged electrical system that causes her to fear fire if the air-conditioner is turned on.   So, if it’s 86 degrees and 90% humidity at 2 a.m., splay yourself naked in front of the fan and hope for the best.

The question is does dread depend on your point of view?  So let’s flip all this to another point of view and have a look.

I’ve made significant strides in my life and with my program.  I’m not making money, true, but rich personal history.   I’m taking careful notes, with soundtracks and animated shorts.  I remain modest, most of the time.  I use my talents for good instead of evil.   I strive to be collaborative, creative and mild.  I am trying my best to be the change I want to see in the world.  

Looked at through the long view of my life, the selfish, manipulative weasels with the bitter aftertaste are also friends of many years, chaps I usually have a good larf with.  

Alternate point of view: it is all good, all good, or to be taken care of, moving in the direction I want to move, remaining calm, in the face of the many compelling reasons not to remain calm.  

If you believe in the laws of karma you will know that the good I am doing will be paid back to me at some point.   The heat and unbearable humidity will pass and I’ll be shivering and putting on a polar-tech jacket soon enough.  I’ll make medical appointments and hopefully get good medical news rather than a diagnosis of the dreaded soft tissue sarcoma.  I’ll figure out the solution to the sudden loss of medical insurance, as I will be obliged to.  All will be resolved.  And in the end, after all, there is only death, and what we did during this blink of an eye here.

Humid July Night in NYC

The new pedometer told me I’d put in 21,146 steps shortly before midnight when I reached the top of the stairs down to the A train at West Fourth Street.   Many of those steps had been logged during a discussion of how to take a successful and unique program and make it a sustainable business, at least for the two of us who were discussing it.  My Hawaiian shirt had not been dry since 5:40, when I stepped off a downtown A with about 6,000 steps on the pedometer.

I was talking to a friend on my late mother’s state of the art Motorola Razr as I walked up Sixth Avenue.  When I headed toward the steps down to my cool A train home my way was blocked by four people arguing at the top of the stairs.   A hot humid night, two couples arguing, one man stressing, rather pointedly, that the other guy should get out of his fucking face, he wasn’t doing nothing, back the fuck off.

Only the guy he was talking to was a young cop, maybe 25, who had to be hot as hell in that uniform in the brutal humidity, and he was one step below the angry guy.  Next to the young cop was his partner, a blond female cop with her hair in a pony tail, a bit taller than the young male cop.   I didn’t like the way things were escalating, but I also couldn’t very well push past the four of them and head down the steps under the circumstances.  They were directly in my way, I had little choice but to watch and wait.

We live in a racist country, let us face that bitter-tasting truth like adults.  The word “nigger”, once a staple of race relations, is now perhaps the most taboo word in the language.  People get fired for saying the “n- word”.  To me calling it the “n-word” is fucking obscene, excuse me, f-ing obscene, and the squeamish neologism makes talking about our deep history of racism more difficult, not less.   But whatever you think about it, “nigger” is certainly not a word to calm the nerves on a hot and humid NYC night when things are escalating, particularly when two people are black and two people are white.  The cops in this case were both white.  Doesn’t that make things clearer, dear reader?

I’m not certain, but I think the man who was insisting on his right not to be harassed by the police finally crossed the line when he imprudently said “I told you to get out of my face, nigger.”  He said this to the young male cop, who sprang like a lion, shoved the man who’d used that terrible word of disrespect against the chain link fence by the basketball courts, kicked his legs apart, roughly frisked him then shoved him on to the ground and knelt on the man’s back.  He jerked, then twisted, the abruptly face down man’s arms behind his back, and applied the handcuffs.  The woman who was with the handcuffed man said “Oh, I didn’t want this…”  She may have wished misfortunes on her angry companion, but not this, face down on the filthy concrete with his hands shackled behind his back.

I narrated all this to my friend who was on the other end of the phone.  She voiced indignation and horror.  I turned to a guy standing next to me, a young black man, who was watching impassively.  “You got a camera on there?” I asked, pointing to his iPhone.

“That’s foul, what you’re doing is foul,” he said softly to the cops.  The cops were in no mood to hear softly whispered words of reproach.  In fact, they didn’t hear them. The arresting officer’s partner was hovering near the prone, handcuffed man, ready with her nightstick if he turned out to be a foul-mouthed Houdini and slipped the cuffs and the young police officer kneeling on his back.

I noticed one more thing, kind of poignant.  It will not show up in the arrest report or in court later on.  The cop kneeling on the guy’s back redistributed his weight slightly and patted the man’s shoulder reassuringly, as though to calm him.   His hand stroked the blue t-shirt the way you’d comfort an inconsolable child.  It was the damnedest thing.

Feedback

No less an authority on having his ass kissed than Pablo Picasso, on the subject of an artist working purely for love of creation, without any need for feedback or praise from anyone who might experience the work:  a false idea.  

But don’t take it from him.  Imagine hitting a baseball further than you ever have before, admiring the arc of the ball, trotting around the bases trying to suppress a smile.  The crowd is large, among them many people you know (your ‘cheering section’) but they are talking among themselves, when you scan the crowd they’re not even looking at the field, most staring at electronic devices, nobody has any reaction to your clout.  Does it diminish the hit?  Not at all.  Diminish the moment?  Completely, transformed from  a great high to a significant bummer.   “Let them show me their latest poem,” you think grimly as you step on home plate, “I’ll show them how it feels”.

But once in a while you not only connect solidly with the pitch, but you get a spontaneous shout of appreciation.  Here’s one, moments after sending a couple of demo tracks trying to convince an ailing musician friend to buy a small, cheap USB keyboard:

Haha love it-  amazon.com here I come!

Started new chemo yesterday, 3 days in a row has me sleeping in fits and starts… Back to sleep with those mimgus like bass lines swimming through my head, you made my day
(night) thnks for sending

meefs

That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Playing together

If it’s music we’re talking about, the first thing is listening.  Don’t do anything at first, listen to the beat.   There are many places to put a note, a beat, an accent;  against the beat, on the beat, next to the beat, slightly off the beat.   The first thing though, is to feel the groove that is waiting to emerge from the beat.

The groove is not the beat, it’s all the stuff around it that makes the beat groove.  Check it out.  One note put in the exact place to make the head jerk forward slightly, or one of the hands to unconsciously, or consciously, flick an invisible, or visible, drumstick.   It sets the groove in motion, wait for it… AH! oh, yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.

I think this is a wonderful metaphor for a good life and playing nicely with the people you meet.  Before you can say something helpful you have to have heard what the person is really trying to say.   Thinking back, many times I could have been more helpful if I’d listened better, and paused to listen to my own thoughts, before launching into a particular solo.

Genetic Predispostion to Laughs

My mother, maybe two weeks before she died, was in her bedroom when a hospice nurse, social worker and someone from a physical therapy place arrived to speak with her.  The previous hospice had declined to give her physical therapy, not because they were mystified that she wasn’t dead already, not because it was pointless to give her the illusion that she was fighting to get stronger when death was days away, but on the grounds that she was too demented to remember the instructions of the physical therapist.

I was incensed, switched from incompetent, vicious Vitas (this conclusion about dementia was but one of their criminal bits of negligence)  back to the other hospice, who’s name escapes me, and a day or two later these three arrived to assess my mother for physical therapy.  I was in the kitchen when these three women went into the bedroom where my mother was resting on the bed.  Within a minute I heard one of the women laughing, soon they were all cracking up.  There were several peals of laughter.  I have no idea what my mother was saying, but the effect was pretty dramatic.

“One thing for sure, your mother is not demented,” said the nurse coming out of the room with a big smile still on her face.  They started physical therapy the next day, and she did pretty well that first session, but session two had to be postponed so she could be admitted to Hospice By The Sea to die a few days later.

I think about this because, while I’m not up against an imminent death sentence as my mother was, I am living a stressful enough existence these days, no income, escalating health insurance, a program that works amazingly but that I haven’t managed to monetize, recruit the people I need to turn it into a sustainable business, blah blah.  There are days when I’m feeling quite desperate about things.  I spend long stretches alone wondering what I was thinking.

Nonetheless, wake me from a sound sleep on one of these days, like my wasted, napping mother, and I will find my footing in the conversation pretty quickly.  There will often be a chuckle or two, even though a moment before I may have been dreaming of my unfair and gratuitous execution.  

Laughter is like medicine, it is medicine, there is nothing as good for you as a good laugh.  At least that’s the way it feels to me, the dramatic reminder that in the midst of horror there is still a moment to lose yourself and your troubles in a roar that makes your heart leap and clears out everything else.

Cain’t Leave It Alone

Thought experiment.   Imagine:

Your father was brilliant and had a wicked sense of humor.  Your father was angry, and prone to panic attacks he could only calm by seizing control.   Your father was always alert, and on the defensive, because he perceived the world as a dangerous zero sum game, stark black and white, only one could win, everybody else: dead.

Your father had good reason to feel hopeless most of the time.    Mistreatment as an infant, we’ll leave it at that.   Brain research suggests that first-hand traumatic violence before the age of three can change certain souls into violent psychopaths.   It is all in the wiring of the brain, who is prone to become a serial killer or a Hitler, when he is violated mercilessly, or witnesses butchery, at a delicate age.  Let’s assume your father was not a psychopath, but that he shared several of the psychopath’s most salient traits.

Your father was brilliant, smart and cunning.  Although he felt helpless much of the time, he was adept at projecting an air of confidence and assurance.   He did this with his great intelligence, his antennae finely tuned to whatever emotions were stirring in the room.  He was expert at keeping people off balance, at controlling conversation.  

Most often he would take control of the conversation in the manner of Socrates, by directing the talk through a series of ever narrowing questions.  The answer to each would lead to the next link in the logical chain.  He was leading his adversary inexorably to a steep cliff, and would soon have him poised at the precipice, neutralized, at his mercy. 

Arthur Kinoy, famous lawyer and lifelong freedom fighter, once pointed out the brilliant legal reasoning in the Dred Scott decision.  The Dred Scott case was one of the judicial last straws before the so-called Civil War.   Kinoy was near the end, a brilliant version of Mr. Magoo, when I knew him.  “Read Dred Scott,” he told us, “you won’t regret it.  It’s a wonderful piece of legal legerdemain.  It’s extremely well-written and every link of the logical chain is perfectly connected to the one before it.  There’s not a single fuzzy moment of logic, actually; the conclusion is unassailable.  The only problem is the premise, the premise, as we all know now, is complete bullshit.”

Although Kinoy did not say ‘bullshit’, he found an equally forceful way to denounce the racist premise of Dred Scott.  As I told somebody the other day, I have a tin ear for quotations.  But that was Kinoy’s supremely important point, an unassailable legal argument, one that cannot be attacked from any legal angle, can be constructed on a pile of shit.

Let’s assume for purposes of this decision that (insert pile of shit here).  The structure that can be built on top of it can be a fortress all the armies in the world could not topple.  In Dred Scott the premise was the Negro’s natural inferiority to the White man.  This gave the White man a clear moral duty to protect the Negro.  From there it was a quick 90 page march to the incontrovertible conclusion that although Dred Scott, an escaped slave, was living in a free state he must be returned to his former master under the Fugitive Slave Act that was constitutional for most of the first century of our great republic.  Some people found this unappealable holding an outrage big enough to give their lives to overturn.

Anyway, I have a bike ride to take and no time to waste, you will forgive me if I plunge ahead to my point.

Imagine your father is like Antonin Scalia, brilliant, trenchant, sardonic;  a master at crafting an eloquent legal justification for his actions.   Your father asks your opinion of a current topic of debate.  Your father challenges you to justify your opinion.  As soon as you do, he seizes on one aspect of your answer and begins charging toward his inexorable conclusion.  Then you will be challenged to choose one of two answers to the question he’s been driving toward, a question only tangentially related to the original inquiry.  

In weighing your answer you will realize that both answers are traps.   If your father has had a particularly rough day, he will conduct this march to your capitulation in a very harsh manner.  

Afterwards, you will take the high road.  You will allow that as he’s framed the question, of course, he is completely correct, there is no possible argument.   You will point out that reasonable people could disagree about any of several key points foreclosed by his constant narrowing of the question.   Then you will tell him directly that you were perplexed to be asked for your opinion and then disrespected and browbeaten into answering an extremely narrow, re-framed question.  Email it off, go ahead, we’ll wait.  You’ll have the reply in seconds, no doubt.

Thanks.  Very interesting.  I’ll think about your take on all this.   I apologize  that our talk  got so contentious.  You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here,  More later..

And you will sigh, not more of this fucking shit.  And you will fashion, but not send, your heavy hearted reply.

Thanks.  Very interesting.  I’ll think about your take on all this.  

Note:  He does not specify what is interesting or what parts of your take he will think about.

I apologize  that our talk  got so contentious.  

Elegant, the way the passive voice was used.  This is a technique law students are actually taught to employ.  “If your client is guilty, whenever you must make any kind of admission, use the passive voice.  Not ‘he killed Tom with a knife’ but ‘Tom was killed with a knife’.  Not contradicting a fact in evidence, something you can’t do in a legal argument, just not stating outright that your boy was the one actually holding the knife when Tom was killed with the knife.  You may not be denying it, but it’s as close as you can come to leaving the person who did it out of the equation.

You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here,  More later.

This is actually a mischievous, hipper way of saying “More never”.  It’s also a classy and gentle way to issue a challenge to the other party:  try to whine about it after I frankly admitted that you deserve a reply.  What do you want from me?  This is clearly your problem, not mine.  

The bit about  I hope to tackle when things ease up around here is another beautiful construction.   “I hope” is excellent, since it is an aspiration, the expression of a fond intention, something more noble than a promise but without the expectation built into giving your word.  “Tackle” is great, because it confesses that the work involved in giving the deserved reply would be strenuous, something of a challenge.  

But best of all is ‘when things ease up around here.’   An inspired echo of one of my father’s favorite lines, from his The Jokes That Killed Vaudeville collection.  “Let me borrow $20, I’ll pay you back as soon as my brother straightens up.”

And pocketing the twenty the vaudevillian gets ready to wink at the audience, “my brother the hunchback!”

Wink!

Why Smiling Anger Can Be So Dangerous

When somebody rages, with eyebrows drawn low over the eyes, teeth bared, facial muscles torqued into a mask of aggression, you have a good indication that you should be careful.  People in this state can become violent, it’s called being “mad” for good reason.  They are out of control in their anger.  They may snap, they could have a heart attack.  It’s fairly easy to recognize, when somebody is in this kind of rage, that care must be taken to avoid things getting worse.

Take rage to its extremest expression and you have murder.   If an angry person kills you, it rarely makes everything right for them.   They just have to start justifying themselves and getting ready to do the same to anybody else who backs them into an infuriating corner.  And, of course, there are the police to worry about, and all the rest of the legal system.

There is another way of displaying anger, a bit more subtle and almost as common.   It expresses itself without snarling, but is just as determined to exact its price.  The real horror of anger?  There is no price it can exact that will really make things better for anybody, outside of a sincere apology and promise to do better next time.  And with this subtle kind of rage, it often has nothing to do with the person it is being visited on, so it cannot be placated.

When you see a genial person become intransigent, but continuing to smile, even as the intransigence escalates, realize what you are dealing with.  If nothing you can say is having any effect, beware.  It is not a situation worth staying in, if you have any way to leave.